Since 2010, Senate Majority Leader Mike Gronstal and Iowa Senate Democrats held back Constitutional Carry and Stand-Your-Ground legislation as state after state enacted this crucial legislation.
With a growing number of their colleagues getting booted out of office for their votes against the Second Amendment thanks to the work of Iowa Gun Owners, they passed ancillary gun bills, but not the bills that Iowans wanted.
Throughout the 2016 session, the NRA and their instate affiliate, the Iowa Firearms Coalition, literally begged Mike Gronstal and Senate Judiciary Chairman Steve Sodders to pass pro-gun legislation in a shameless display of desperation, but got nothing in return.
Iowa Gun Owners doesn’t beg.
So at the conclusion of the 2016 legislative session, Iowa Gun Owners and the Dorr Brothers got ready to go to war against Mike Gronstal and his caucus of gun-grabbers.
The 2010 election program that we conducted for Iowa Gun Owners was capped at a budget just under $25,000 and utilized the only tools that we had available to us at the time — direct mail and mass emails.
Things were different in 2016.
The budget that we had to operate with was $150,000 enabling a full compliment of radio and TV ads, slicks, and digital ads, in addition to our lit dropping program and direct mail/email programs.
With the Iowa House and Governors mansion already in ostensibly pro-gun hands, our entire focus in 2016 was on the Iowa Senate, and primarily on four key districts. These districts were SD-8, SD-36, SD-26, SD-32 and the incumbents were Mike Gronstal, Steve Sodders, Mary Jo Wilhelm, and Brian Schoenjahn.
Once the Republican nominees in these races signed the Iowa Gun Owners candidate survey 100%, we knew that our offensive target list was locked in. (This was in addition to some races where we operated in a defensive capacity, like SD-4 and SD-10.)
Having our budget and target list enabled us to get to work early that summer. We knew that later in the year both the Presidential and Congressional campaigns would be buying up all of the air time, meaning that whatever time was leftover, would be very expensive.
That’s why we commissioned our media specialist to lock in an astounding $70,000 worth of radio and TV ads in late June. This ensured that we not only locked in the spots we wanted, but that we got them locked in at 25%-30% cheaper than those spots would have been had we waited until the fall.
Spending $70,000, at the reduced rates that we locked in at, allowed us to lock in a mountain of TV and radio spots!
Of course, it depends on the time of day, the stations in question, and the number of spots per channel/station. But when it was all said and done, we locked in an astounding 388 30-second TV spots and another 390 60-second radio spots for Iowa Gun Owners members!
You can check out our 30 second TV ad slamming Mike Gronstal below.
To see the ads we ran in Senate District 26, exposing Mary Jo Wilhelm, go here.
To see the ads we ran in Senate District 32, exposing Brian Schoenjahn, go here.
To see the ads we ran in Senate District 36, exposing Steve Sodders, go here.
These ads ran on channels like WHO-TV, WOI-TV, KDSM, KIMT, WOWT, KPTM, KMTV, KWWL and others!
These TV ads were ready-made digital ads, too, and allowed us to get double use out of them by flooding these targeted districts with the same ads on Facebook. These ads allowed us to target our ads by zip code, providing saturation level market penetration at a reasonable cost.
As you can see in the screen shot of our Facebook page, just days after early voting began during the 2016 election cycle, our ad in the Gronstal race had already been seen by an astounding 71,000 people in Council Bluffs and Carter Lake!
The same thing was playing out in all of the districts that we were focused on, getting the information in our ads into the hands of hundreds of thousands of gun owners at an affordable price.
Our radio ads were longer versions of our TV ads, allowing us to get twice the information on the airwaves to gun owners in those districts.
In some cases, we could run an entire 60-second radio ad for just $40!
To hear the radio ads we ran in Senate District 36, exposing Judiciary Chairman Steve Sodders, below.
To hear the radio ads we ran in Senate District 26, exposing Mary Jo Wilhelm, go here.
To hear the ads we ran in Senate District 32, exposing Brian Schoenjahn, go here.
These ads ran on radio stations like 1040 WHO, KFJB, KGLO, KCHA, KNEI, KVIK, KDEC, KFAB and more!
Of course, Iowa Gun Owners has always used direct mail as the backbone of our mobilization programs and the 2016 election cycle was no exception.
In fact, the 2016 election cycle direct mail program was the largest that Iowa Gun Owners has done in any election cycle, before or after!
Naïve politicos (and Iowa is full of them) try to convince their clients that direct mail is a waste of money, but that’s only because they are hoping to sell campaigns and non-profit organization like Iowa Gun Owners on the more expensive radio and TV ads that make them more money.
The fact is, the direct mail pieces that Aaron wrote for Iowa Gun Owners during this time were jam packed with bill numbers, voting records, dates and all of the rest of the information gun owners needed to decide for themselves who was the pro-gun candidate.
And believe me, we rolled out a mountain of direct mail, flooding gun owners in these districts with this information, as you can see from this picture below!
When the AR-15 we put in the middle of this pile of mail wasn’t big enough to show the scale of this mountain of mail, we rolled Aaron’s Dodge Dakota behind it instead!
Each one of those mail trays was jammed with hundreds of pieces of mail!
Our initial budget allowed us to fully implement the Radio/TV/Digital ad portions of our 2016 election program. And once we had the funds in place for our direct mail efforts, we added a round of ‘slicks’ to ensure that gun owners could have something to pass around at work, at church, or around the family dinner table at night.
This allowed gun owners to personalize the lying politicians who had betrayed their gun rights for years in Des Moines.
You see, Mike Gronstal and his socialist pals believe that ‘what happens in Des Moines, stays in Des Moines’ and that they can more or less tell their constituents whatever they want to during the election season, trusting that voters who live hours from the Capitol won’t know the truth.
‘Slicks’ like the one you see below remind gun owners exactly what their politicians did during their time in Des Moines, and bring to light the very facts that the gun-grabbers try to gloss over.
Iowa Gun Owners deployed tens of thousands of these ‘slicks’ in the four districts where we focused the majority of our firepower during the 2016 election season.
Check out the front side of these slicks for yourself!
The moment that Aaron thought the budget was going to be filled for this portion of Iowa Gun Owners’ program, he went to work locking in the best rate he could get.
And, just like the radio and TV ads, we were able to lock these in mid-summer, allowing us to get a fantastic rate on these from a company on the edge of West Des Moines!
Throughout all of this, timing was crucial as we didn’t want to have our multiple rounds of direct mail landing at the same time that our ‘slicks’ landed.
And we wanted to avoid too much overlap in our radio and TV ads, as well, to make sure that we had the maximum impact!
But eventually, all of the preparation work was completed.
The direct mail was written and produced.
The radio and TV ads were produced and submitted to the media stations.
The ‘slicks’ were approved and sent off to the print shop in West Des Moines for printing and mailing.
And the digital ads were loaded onto Iowa Gun Owners’ social media platform with their ‘boosts’ approved by Facebook.
With the remaining time that we had, the Dorr Brothers and a mountain of Iowa Gun Owners volunteers conducted door to door literature drops, passing out our voter score card to as many people as possible in these four districts.
Sure, not every house contains a voter. But going door to door made it very easy for our volunteers to quickly move through these neighborhoods. And let me tell you, we went fast! In total, we passed out just shy of 20,000 flyers in those four districts using this method.
(We had so many volunteers — and so many of Aaron’s kids — helping with these literature drops that campaigns began contacting us, asking us if we were for hire as they couldn’t get any volunteers to help them. )
The Iowa Firearms Coalition didn’t do a single one of these lit drops during the 2016 election cycle. Nor did they roll out any radio or TV ads, direct mail, slicks, or anything else. It was an incredible betrayal of gun owners.
For a group that is always asking gun owners for money to fund their operation…where did it go? If they don’t spend it at election time, why not? These are great questions for gun owners to ask.
On election night, all of the work that Iowa Gun Owners and the Dorr Brothers did on their behalf paid off!
Senate Majority Leader Mike Gronstal, a 34-year incumbent, was thrown out of office.
So was Judiciary Chairman Steve Sodders, 12-year incumbent Mary Jo Wilhelm, and longtime gun-grabbing Senator Brian Schoenjahn!
It was a clean sweep for gun owners in Iowa, thanks to the hard work of Iowa Gun Owners and the Dorr Brothers. And it was this election program that made the passage of Stand-Your-Ground a possibility in 2017!
To read about the ‘Stand-Your-Ground legislation that passed in 2017 because of Iowa Gun Owners and the Dorr Brothers’ efforts, go here.
To learn more about the 2010 election program that the Dorr brothers ran for Iowa Gun Owners, go here.
To read about the work that Iowa Gun Owners and the Dorr Brothers did in stopping town gun bans throughout Iowa, go here.